Performance and responsiveness
The
cinnamon desktop performance has improved from the past releases
but without an SSD you can feel a bit sluggish. The last time I used cinnamon desktop was in version 4.4.8, the
There isRAM consumption right after boot was around 750mb. a huge improvement in the current version 4.8.6, reduced by 100 MB after boot.
Performance and responsiveness
MATE desktop has a reputation of its lightweight nature and there is no doubt about that. Compared to Cinnamon desktop, the CPU usage always remains a bit lower, and this can be translated to a better battery life on a laptop.
Although it doesn’t feel as snappy as Xfce (in my opinion), but not to an extent to compromise user experience.
RAM consumption starts under 500 MB which is impressive for a feature rich desktop environment.
XFCE
At the first boot the ram usage is
similar to MATE desktop but not quite as good. If your computer isn’t equipped with an SSD, Xfce desktop environment can resurrect your system.
Linux Mint 20.2
System requirements:
1GB RAM (2GB recommended for a comfortable usage)
LM20.2 also has the ability to dial back the ram usage
Performance and resource usage
5 memory leaks were fixed in Cinnamon 5 and a new monitor was implemented to detect, log and tackle cases where Cinnamon takes too much memory.
Using the system settings you can now limit the maximum amount of RAM Cinnamon can use:
Memory limit in Cinnamon 5.0
If that maximum amount is reached Cinnamon will restart itself. You won't lose your session or your windows, Cinnamon will just be unresponsive for about a second while it restarts itself internally. It will keep a log of such events so that you can see if this happens often and help the development team troubleshoot the issue.
The Cinnamon screensaver daemon used to run constantly in the background. In Cinnamon 5.0 it now only runs on-demand when the screensaver needs to be activated. This results in a net minimum gain of about 20MB RAM on lean specs and up to a few hundred MB of RAM on some computers.
Although it's technically more akin to a code change and not a resource usage optimization, the response time for quickly switching between two applications using Alt+Tab was improved, giving the impression of a snappier desktop environment.